What do the Google searches; Orlando Hotels, Miami Discount Car Rental & Dallas Discount Car Rental have in common? The obvious answer is that they are all local searches on popular phrases in major metro areas. A less obvious answer is that like the infamous Denver Florist search last December, they all return seemingly authoritative […]
Google Maps recently introduced a new user interface for the Local Business Center. There were some issues with the upgrade and Carter Maslan, Google’s Director of Product Management for Local, agreed to answer some of my questions about the process in a phone conversation. Below, selected excerpts from our conversation:
I’ve been writing about Mapspam appearing in both Google and Yahoo search results for some time now. Mapspam is where black hat SEOs spam local search and map listings, and like all black hat techniques, it seems to get more sophisticated as the search engines find ways to combat the spammers’ techniques. There’s a new […]
Over the past several weeks I have explored some of the issues involved with categorization of businesses in Google Maps on my blog, Understanding Google Maps. In Part 1, I detailed the more than year-long history of small business frustration. In Part 2, I provided some background on the early research and the difficulty with […]
What does mobile computing, that online all the time phenom of the future, look like, and how soon will we have ubiquitous mobile search? Apple Chairman Steve Jobs offered some serious clues in his keynote address here in San Francisco at MacWorld this morning.
The fix is in, the votes have been counted, and the winners determined in the 2007 Rubber Chicken Award for Humor (aka the Columbo) in the search industry. And the winners are:
I’m now taking nominations for the 2007 top 10 list of the funniest/most irreverent blog entries in search. Why? The search industry is important. I mean, what industry (besides the sex industry) can singlehandedly cause Google to change its vaunted PageRank algo? However, on occasion we tend to take ourselves too seriously. I have always […]
After the first relatively unsophisticated Google MapSpam bulk upload attempt became public, I had a long and interesting conversation with a webmaster who had spent many years implementing a “long tail search” campaign on behalf of local business in a major market. He pointed out that with a little bit of work, a national company […]